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ADDRESS 



BY 



THEODORE W. NOYES 

President of the Association of Oldest Inhabitants 
of the District of Columbia 






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ON THE ASSOCIATION'S FORTY-FOURTH 

BIRTHDAY ANNIVERSARY 

DECEMBER 7, 1909 



Printed by order of the Association 






Transf2rr«d from 

Librariao':. . :';'iC2. 
JUL 3 1911 






Address by President Theodore W. Noyes at the Association's Forty- 
Fourth Birthday Anniversary. 



At the last anniversary meeting of the Association I stated 
that the needs of the Oldest Inhabitants, as an organization, 
were: (1) To secure from Congress legislation authorizing us 
to occupy jointly with the Veteran Firemen the old Union 
engine house, and, (2) to increase the Association's member- 
ship from eligible and worthy Washingtonians. Both of these 
needs have been met wholly or in part. The desired legisla- 
tion concerning the use of the engine house has been secured, 
and sixty- four new members have been added to the rolls, a 
net increase, after deducting deaths, of forty-five. The Asso- 
ciation now numbers 356 members. Analysis of the 334 
applications which remain on file shows that fifty-six of this 
number are between 50 and 60 years of age, 129 between 60 
and 70, 108 between 70 and 80, thirty-five between 80 and 
90, and six between 90 and 100. Thus the bulk of the 
membership is between 60 and 80 years of age. 

The Association is a representative and democratic organ- 
ization, bringing together many occupations and conditions 
of men in Washington on the common plane of Washing- 
tonianism. 

I have to report no long record of works for the public wel- 
fare achieved during the year by the organization directly or 
through committees. The Association is not devoted to either 
civic or commercial development of the capital. It is a rival 
neither of the Chamber of Commerce nor the Board of Trade. 
The latter organizations deal primarily with the material 
Washington of the present and future, its buildings, streets 
and parks, its commerce, and its manufactures. The Oldest 
Inhabitants Association is concerned with the men of Wash- 
ington, and primarily with the past. Its main function is 
reminiscent and preservative. It preserves the records, sou- 
venirs, traditions and memories of Washington's past, and in- 
fluences the city's present and future only as they are built 
upon the precedents of the past. It fosters the loyalty of the 
Washingtonian to Washington, the self-respect of the Wash- 
ingtonian, and the affection and pride which he feels in his 
own and the Nation's city. 

(3) 



5iasl)iuijtnuiautunt. 

The basic requirement of the Association is that identifica- 
tion with Washington which comes from thirty-five years' 
local residence of a man at least half a century old. While its 
strength is in reminiscence, not in action, its foundation and 
basic principle of Washingtonianism furnish one standard of 
public action, under which it may rally all its members. 

It is naturally the organized champion and defender of the 
Washingtonian as a man, leaving to other organizations the 
material development of Washington as a city. It may ap- 
propriately feel that its characteristic and exclusive public 
function is the defense of the Washingtonian himself against 
all assailants, the advocate of all movements to elevate and 
dignify his status. And in this connection the Association 
might well create as its only public welfare committee a 
strong and representative committee on the status and rights 
of the Washingtonian. 

The Oldest Inhabitants Association, thus founded solely on 
Washingtonianism, furnishes the Nation a sometimes much 
needed demonstration that such things as Washingtonians 
exist. It answers in part the query: "What is a Washing- 
tonian?" which with the equally perplexing questions, "What 
is whisky?" and "What is a democrat?" has attracted public 
attention. 

"What is a Washingtonian" as tested by eligibility to mem- 
bership among the Oldest Inhabitants? 

He is not necessarily a native of Washington. That founda- 
tion would be too narrow. There are too many forces reducing 
to a minimum the opportunities of local self-support and too 
many other disabilities which drive the Washington youth 
from his native city. 

He does not necessarily abandon voting residence in the 
States. Hundreds of Washingtonians employed in the gov- 
ernment service, thoroughly identified with the city from long 
residence here, have been able to retain voting and other State 
privileges elsewhere, and are welcomed, the other eligibility 
conditions being met, as members of the Oldest Inhabitants 
Association. 

While there is no requirement that a member of the Associ- 
ation shall have legal residence nowhere else than in Wash- 
ington, those who have lived here for thirty-five years will in 
very few instances have retained their outside residence; if 
retained, it is held only by a feeble grip; and their sons, for 
whose welfare and not their own the Oldest Inhabitants now 
take most anxious thought, will never have acquired it at all. 
Thus the Oldest Inhabitants Association, while not nominally 



composed of Washingtonians claiming residence nowhere else, 
is substantially and in fact representative of this class of 
Washingtonians, which grows larger and larger every year, 
increasing not only in numbers but in resources and influence, 
and is destined finally perhaps to include all the people of 
the District. 

iaoktf h 1iaal|tttgt0ttmtt. 

What is this isolated Washingtonian claiming residence no- 
where else ? What are some of his characteristics as suggested 
by friend or foe ? 

He is among all Americans by far the largest contributor to 
the upbuilding of the National Capital — as donor of the city's 
site, and of lots sold to get funds to erect the original public 
buildings, and as taxpayer, local and national — yet in his 
financial relation to the Nation he is pronounced by the igno- 
rant or malicious a greedy mendicant! 

He is an American who is told that his only rights in his 
home city are those of petition and emigration, to supplicate 
or evacuate, to beg or get out; and if he does not or can not 
get out, and proceeds to petition, he is denounced by the 
ignorant and malicious as an impudent beggar! 

He is one whose exclusive legislature, to whose tender 
mercies his interests are solely confided, in effect forbids to 
his sons the local means of self-support provided by the com- 
mercial and manufacturing industries of the ordinary Ameri- 
can city, and then by the apportionment of offices law (of 
late extended and even more rigidly applied and enforced) 
practically shuts out the Washington youth from the classified 
service and in effect bars them from the only great industries 
which it permits to exist in the nation's city. 

As a candidate either for certain national offices exercised 
in the nation's city which are in effect local offices, or for its 
purely local offices, which elsewhere are filled as a matter of 
course from the local community, he is coming more and more 
each year to be greeted with the derisive and humiliating an- 
nouncement: "No Washingtonians need apply!" 

He is the citizen of a State when burdens are imposed and 
not the citizen of a State or even of a Territory when privi- 
leges are conferred. 

For example, the District has been pronounced a State (by 
the courts), under a treaty with France, a construction con- 
ferring privileges on aliens, but not a State under the Consti- 
tution, whose people can sue in the Federal courts. The 
District is a State (in the Constitution) when direct taxes are 
to be collected, but not a State (in the Constitution) when 
representatives are apportioned, though the Constitution 



6 

couples the two things. Public attention has recently been 
called to the fact that the Washingtonian is not the citizen of 
a State or even of a Territory in the distribution of educa- 
tional appropriations under the Morrill acts. 

On the other hand, the isolated Washingtonian has the honor 
of being an effectively working, though silent, co-paitner with 
the Nation in developing a National Capital of which every 
American is proud. 

His municipal government, in the opinion of some of us, 
meets the spirit of the principle of no taxation without repre- 
sentation, and the converse principle of no representation 
without taxation, and in raising and disbursing taxes reflects 
the will of the taxpayers more completely than in any other 
large American city. Here Congress, representing the half- 
taxpayer, decides all tax and appropriation questions, after 
consulting with the representatives of the other taxpayers, to 
whom in the grant of the power to submit estimates it gives 
the initiative of suggestion in respect to appropriative legisla- 
tion. Here the great majority of the taxpayers are back of 
every legislative decision concerning appropriations; in other 
large American cities, under a misapplication of the principle 
of government by unlimited popular suffrage, the organized 
nontaxpayers control, as a rule, the city's purse and spend as 
they please the money contributed by taxpayers. 

While denied representation as Americans in the national 
legislature and electoral college, the Washingtonian is the 
most national American of all Americans, the only exclusive 
American owing no divided allegiance to State and Nation. 

How many are there of the isolated Washingtonians thus 
briefly characterized ? What should be their status and rights? 
Are they to grow in American privileges and national con- 
sideration until the}' become (except for national legislative 
control through Congress) a distinct American community, or 
are they to be destroyed as a community and scattered in 
citizenship among the States of the Union? 

The next census should through appropriate questions 
determine definitely the number of isolated Washingtonians. 
The present tendency is for Washingtonians to lose State 
residence and become isolated in spite of the disabilities 
which attach to this status. When this local community is 
shown by the census to exceed the number of Americans 
represented by each member of the House there should follow 
either (1) recognition of a distinct American community en- 
titled to all American rights consistent with the exclusive 
legislative control of the District by the Nation through Con- 



gress, and including representation in Congress and the 
Electoral College, or else (2) the class of isolated Washing- 
tonians should be emptied by law and the community dis- 
solved. Under this alternative the municipal functions would 
be distributed among the Federal departments. 

No District citizenship or legal residence therein will then 
be recognized. A citizen of a State who comes here in 
the public service or otherwise will retain automatically, by 
force of law, his legal residence in his State, and his children 
after him, though born in the District. Those who have no 
State residence elsewhere might appropriately, without leav- 
ing the District, become Marylanders, since citizens of Mary- 
land were the original inhabitants of this portion of the ten 
miles square who voted for a Congress in which they were not 
represented, and, in theory, for all future Congresses to the 
end of time, as the exclusive legislature for all future Wash- 
ingtonians. And when every inhabitant of Washington is the 
legal resident of some State, with rights and a legal domicile 
which he can not lose either for himself or his sons by living 
in Washington, provision might well be made for the exercise 
of his voting right in Washington itself, without requiring 
the expensive transportation of voters to polls half-way across 
or clear across the continent. Ballots might well be cast and 
collected here for counting in the States, just as votes of 
soldiers at the front in the civil war were collected and counted 
as if cast in elections in their respective States. 

The Oldest Inhabitants Association naturally favors the 
preservation and development of the independent status of the 
isolated Washingtonian and not his elimination. It un- 
doubtedly feels that it would be better for both Nation and 
capital that Washington, instead of becoming merely the 
national camping ground, the temporary abiding place of 
transient Americans, should be, though under exclusivenational 
control through Congress, a distinct American community , with 
local citizens, local traditions, local self-respect, and local pride. 

But whatever the actual solution may be, the problem 
must be solved of the status — political, judicial, indus- 
trial, material — of a populous and intelligent American 
community, living at the National Capital, but politically 
outside of the Nation; and this problem promises to become 
in the not remote future, with the notable growth of the class 
of isolated Washingtonians, one of the most important and 
urgent which will confront the President, Congress, and the 
American people. 



8 
Asaoriatinn'fi dlufUtPurp. 

The Oldest Inhabitants Association increasing steadily in 
numbers and influence, can help to prepare for this day, and 
for the wisest and fairest solution of the problem. For several 
reasons the Oldest Inhabitants Association may appropriately 
and without presumption consider the status and rights of the 
Washingtonian. Its labors will be largely unselfish and dis- 
interested. In working to increase the American rights of 
the Washingtonian its members will not be seeking benefits 
so much for themselves as for their sons and the adopted 
Washingtonians who come after them. The reprtsentatives 
of the Oldest Inhabitants will labor for what concerns 
especially the youngest inhabitants, and the Association thus 
links together old and young. An Oldest Inhabitants Asso- 
ciation committee on the status of the Washingtonian would 
approach its task with the knowledge of and sympathy with 
Washington which come from more than thirty-five years of 
local residence and with the conservatism of judgment which 
may be expected from men averaging over sixty years of age. 

The Oldest Inhabitants Association based solely on Wash- 
ingtonianism, would have the advantage of concentration and 
singleness of purpose in considering the status of the Wash- 
ingtonian. It would not be embarras.sed as other organiza- 
tions might be by complexity of purposes and motives. It is 
not seeking appropriations from Congress or appointments 
from the President. It is not devoting all its energies to the 
promotion of the material capital of the future, and it may 
therefore without embarrassment and wdth good effect seek 
consideration for the men of Washington. 

In the Association's campaign of 1910 to enlarge its member- 
ship and swell the class of isolated Washingtonians the inter- 
ests of Washington and of the Association are the same. The 
long identification with Washington on which the Oldest In- 
habitants organization is based is the most essential factor in 
strong, influential and loyal local citizenship. As fast as the 
city fills with men who have been long resident in it as home 
owners, whose property and sentimental interests are both 
identified with it, who loyally work for it under the im- 
pulse of pride and affection, so fast will the city whole- 
somely develop. Whatever tends to hold Washingtonians to 
Washington, to cause the city's young inhabitants to develop 
in due course into old inhabitants, not only swells the mem- 
bership list of the Association, but strengthens and builds up 
Washington the city. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

014 369 670 4 J 



